Lexical education, instruction, practice and/or drilling typically involves the use of vocabulary cards. Vocabulary cards are often similar to playing cards, that is, they are flat, only slightly flexible pieces of paper or thin paperboard, often rectangular in shape. Typically a word among those being learned is displayed on one side of the vocabulary card, and on the opposite side is displayed (1) its meaning and/or translation, (2) its pronunciation guides or symbols, and/or possibly (3) other assistive information, such as a drawing depicting the word, use examples, variant spellings, the word's part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun and the like), other functional designations and the like. A student drills and/or tests his or her ability to identify the words on a group or battery of cards one at a time, flipping the card over to check his or her answer or to determine the correct answer.
Vocabulary cards are an educational aid of the generic type commonly referred to as flash cards. Flash cards are or can be used in many educational fields. Their use is well known in the teaching of mathematics, and are or can be used for history (for example, events versus their dates or principal participants), geography (for example, states versus their capital cities), science (for example, elements versus periodic table information) and so forth. The potential uses of flash cards is virtually unlimited. They can be used as an aid to mastering almost any educative and/or instructive field that requires the acquiring of new information and/or knowledge.
The study of a language foreign to a person's native language normally requires the mastery (through memorization or other learning techniques) of hundreds or thousands of words. Conventional reading and/or vocabulary lessons for school children might also require the drilling of hundreds of words. In either situation, words that have been studied once normally must be reviewed periodically. When flash cards are used, the cards requiring periodic review can quickly become so numerous that their management is unwieldy and cumbersome. There are too many cards for a complete review in a single time period, and a systematic review during multiple time periods approaches being impossible without an effective organization of the cards. Further, if the organization task is time-consuming, or even just boring, the learning process is negatively impacted.